No Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo in the Uefa Champions League quarter final round. The last time this happened was in the, brace yourself, 2004-05 season, remembered for the “Miracle of Istanbul” — Liverpool’s epic comeback win against AC Milan in the final at the Ataturk Stadium.
To put it in perspective, the last time Europe’s premier club tournament did not feature neither talisman in the last eight Manmohan Singh was the Prime Minister of India, George W. Bush was still hunting for Osama bin Laden as he began his second term as US President, Sourav Ganguly was still the captain of the Indian cricket team, his spat with Greg Chappell would come a few months later, Mahendra Singh Dhoni was yet to make his Test debut, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim had just founded YouTube and the world was dealing with the bird flu.
When neither Juventus nor Barcelona made the semi-finals last season, that was the first time we hadn’t seen at least one of them in the last four since 2004-05. Having at least Messi or Ronaldo in the last four happened every single season from 2005-06 to 2019-20. And in those 15 editions, the duo had combined to win the competition nine times.
After Porto booted out Ronaldo and Juventus on Tuesday night, Paris Saint-Germain, as expected, eliminated Messi and Barcelona on Wednesday evening.
But not before Messi left a glorious souvenir, scoring a wonderful goal that kindled some hope of a Barcelona comeback at the Parc des Princes, which was not to be.
PSG, who had done the hard work a fortnight earlier, held the visitors to a 1-1 draw, completing a 5-2 aggregate victory for last campaign’s finalists.
For much of the first half though, the Catalan giants dominated the game, launching an all-out assault on the PSG goal and creating a flurry of chances that could have been enough to see them overcome the 4-1 deficit from the opening leg had their finishing been sharper.
Barcelona were 1-0 behind in the 31st minute of the second leg, thanks to a penalty converted by Kylian Mbappé, when Messi drilled his left foot into a swerving, dipping long-range drive to equalise.
That proof of genius briefly made the improbable seem viable, and allowed his teammates to dream of a mission impossible. The man who stood in the way was PSG goalkeeper Keylor Navas who waged a one-man battle against the likes of Messi, Antoine Griezmann and Ousmane Dembele.
The Costa Rica international had plenty of work to do: he tipped on to his crossbar a Sergiño Dest effort, and, just before half-time, made the most important save of the match by pushing Messi’s penalty on to the bar after Layvin Kurzawa had fouled Griezmann.
Failure to convert the spot-kick was a blow because by then Barcelona had PSG pinned back. Messi’s penalty, low and too close to Navas, reminded us that, yes, he is mortal. There was a suspicion of encroachment from Marco Verratti as Navas saved — VAR decided otherwise.
Barcelona continued to press in the second half but by then PSG had organised their defence and as the minutes ticked by, their dreams receded.
As the final whistle was blown the question on everyone’s minds was, was this Messi’s farewell to European nights with Barcelona? Head coach Ronald Koeman would hope not. “Leo can’t have any doubts about the future of this team,” Koeman said. “He has to decide his own future, nobody can help him with that. But he can see that for a while now this side has been getting better and better and the young players are really coming through.”
Possibly, but what Koeman didn’t say was the sort of younger players who may compare to Messi are elsewhere — players such as Mbappé.
By converting the PSG penalty to open the scoring, Mbappé became the fastest player in history to 25 Champions League goals.
Mbappé can dream of more as he and his new PSG head coach, Mauricio Pochettino, now look forward to the draw for the last eight. Without Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo to contend with.
